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TRANSCRIPT:

 

DOUG: Jonnny, how’d you get your start? Obviously, analytics sort of goes with AI, but what made you realize that AI could be a significant thing?

 

JONNY: It was when I was talking to my friends a few years ago when people said, let me find out what’s going on. And they went to ChatGPT before they went to Google. Something clicked in my mind then. It was like, this is the way things are going. And I remember I was talking to those people who also had the same vision as me. And I was lucky enough to know through a friend, a guy called James Cadwallader, who was the founder of Profound. And I spoke with him in June 2024 before Profound was even created. And I said, I’ve got this idea. He said, I’ve got the same idea. And we became Profound’s first ever customer and hope to cocreate together. And that was like a tipping point in my career in that we saw AI not just as something that’s cool, but as it’s just changed everything. I mean, in my career, I remember the birth of the Internet and the dot com boom. I remember launching the iPhone. This is bigger. Unfortunately, I wasn’t in a position where I could do something about it.

 

DOUG: It’s amazing. And, obviously, now that company has a valuation over a billion dollars. Hopefully, you have a valuation close to that. And if not, maybe after the podcast, you will. But obviously, AI, huge changes in the PR landscape and you’ve got the data and information. What’s the biggest change you see? And then we’ll get into so how do you manage around that?

 

JONNY: I just see that PR professionals need to try and take this seriously. Boardrooms around the world are thinking about how can we use AI, and they’re thinking about maybe optimizing an email and making it sound a little bit better or creating a chatbox. I don’t care about this. None of it makes a difference if people aren’t buying your stuff. And so, my lens is different to everyone else’s, and I want PR to see the same thing. It’s how is your brand seen in that first answer that comes back because this is an additive approach. We need to think differently. It’s not just those tentpole moments that we’ve always done. It’s that ongoing rolling thunder that we need to get out of that to get that first answer in Gen AI.

 

DOUG: People are starting to get it, touching it, but you don’t want them just to get on the AI horse, you want them to be ahead in that race. So, how do you persuade them to do that?

 

JONNY: Well, I’m a data person, so let’s go with the numbers. First of all, 77% of your customers in the consumer space are going to GenAI first to figure out the first answer. More than half of those people trust GenAI more than their friends. Now, some of the people listening to this may be in the B2B space and say, well, it’s not the same for me. I’m in the B2B space. It’s actually even worse, it’s in the ninetieth percentile. But let me explain why. I’m gonna smack some behavioral science on you. You pick up your phone, you do a Google search, and the same thing happens. You look at the results and you go, yeah, that’s rubbish. They paid for that keyword, they sponsored that result. And you scroll past, scroll past, scroll past, and it’s nothing. 75% percent of all Google searches are zero click, which means they go nowhere. Nothing happens, but now people go to GenAI and they go, bloody hell, that answer’s perfect. I’m just gonna accept that. They ask a question, they see the answer. And with intent, they don’t go anywhere else. What’s happened with our phone originally scrolling past, we have critical thinking. Now, we’ve got anchor bias. We just take that first answer. And I would love humans to imply more critical thinking. We’re doing less. We’re just taking that first answer. So, I’d love to live in this world where people are more analytical, but knowing that people are just going to this one place and taking that first answer, this is why we need to take this seriously. This is why PR professionals and comms professionals need to get on the ball with this because this is how people are acting.

 

DOUG: Yeah. And we’ve been seeing that with earned media taking a key role because that was sort of a wake up moment for us that, hey, we have to figure out that all the earned media we do has to be optimized, and has to be addressing the questions that people are asking, and associate them with the brands. One of the things that you spoke about at the AMEC conference that was so great was sort of the four f’s of how people and PR people need to be thinking and approaching this to really get the optimization results that they’re looking for.

 

JONNY: Yeah. So, the four Fs is looking at actually more owned content about what can be done to make sure that my content’s picked up by Gen AI. And these are the four Fs. The first one is can it be found? So, you gotta be thinking, especially on your own website, is it built on JavaScript? Because GenAI cannot read JavaScript. Then have a look at, has it got a paywall? Axios, I used to have a $6,000 subscription to Axios. They gave me a refund because they removed the paywall. I wonder how many other media sites are gonna remove the paywall so that content can be found by GenAI. What about URLs? Just a few key things, even adding dash 2026 onto your URL improves the chances that your content would be cited. So meta descriptions, URL, JavaScript, paywalls, all these things are the first F, can it be found? The second F, what’s the feel of it? And what I mean by that is does our content match the language of the people who are asking questions? For all my career, we talk about message pull through. I wanna flip this. I don’t want us to be thinking about, are people using our language? I wanna be using everyone else’s language and making it our own. So, if our content matches semantically to the questions that people are asking, we’re more likely to be picked up. The third F is format. So, what you’re thinking about here is if you want to be that first answer, you’ve got to create answer first content. So, this could be how-tos. It could be FAQs, it could be expert quotes. When you ask a question to Gen AI, it scours the world. And if someone has written a piece of concept, these are the ten things that are good about this compared to the 10 things that are good about someone else, GenAI can just copy and paste that. So, if we write in that kind of format, we’re more likely to be picked up. The fourth F is freshness. And this is because Gen AI has a recency bias. We need to get beyond just looking at tentpole moments. We’ve gotta have that always on approach. Oh, that always on approach could be writing blog posts every single week, but you know what? At the end of the year, when you look at your Google Analytics and how many people have read your blog, you could be really happy that your readership is zero. When you’re marketing to machines, our audience isn’t always humans. When we’re sticking press releases on the wire, I’m okay with not a single journalist picking it up. We’re not doing it for journalists. It goes on to 5,000 websites, and large language models love that. So, we all need to work differently. So, the four F’s, found, feel, format, and fresh. That’s what we need to do to get our content picked up.

 

DOUG: Great. And I should add that our wonderful producer on the show also does some work on our website. I hope she hasn’t just left the production here to start making some of those tweaks that you have, but I love when you give people actionable content. When change happens, there’s always some resistance. And obviously, you’re an incredibly persuasive communicator. Any advice to sort of help overcome that resistance both among clients, both among employees? Because sort of anything you bring up, there’s always a question, will people need to change and that’s stressful. So, give us your pitch. How do we get people to change apart from, like, a threat like, hey, do you wanna still work in the industry? You need to change, but what else is there?

 

JONNY: We are in the best position possible. I’ve got goosebumps just thinking about it. No one is doing anything in GenAI. There’s a lot of people talking about it and a few people are dipping their toe in. And I know that when I speak to people who say, look. Across earned, owned, and social, and shopping, these are all the things you can do. People are overwhelmed. They’re overwhelmed so much they don’t know where to start. On top of that, there’s all these AI transformation discussions and all the normal work that we’re doing.

 

DOUG: To your point, they probably shouldn’t start by trying to optimize an email they’re sending. You might have a different approach to that.

 

JONNY: That’s where a lot of people are even thinking at the moment, they can’t get beyond that. And I’m talking about, hey, you’ve gotta be looking at your website and you’ve gotta be look creating your tier 1 Gen AI media. It’s overwhelming. So, this is what I normally say. I have ten tips I normally give, but I’m just gonna cut straight to the tenth tip. And that is just start. Just start now. We’ve gotta be thinking like marginal gains. You know, the team, team Sky, really famous racing team that kept on winning year after year after year, and they’d adopted this principle of marginal games. It would be as simple as let’s take on matches from one hotel to the next hotel so we’ll always have a good night’s sleep. That maybe improve their chances by half a percent. Having a heated blanket on their thighs in the morning maybe increase the chances of a kind of a quarter of a percent. All these little things may get a difference. So, maybe tomorrow, how would that work with us? How do you get people to stop feeling overwhelmed just to get on? Well, maybe tomorrow, you can take all those YouTube videos you’ve got and just copy and paste the transcripts and put it in the description. YouTube is one of the most highly cited things even though GenAI can’t read the videos, but it can read the description. So, maybe that’s one thing everyone can do tomorrow. Maybe the second thing is looking at the URLs of all the content on your own website and adding dash 2026 on the end of it, making sure everything’s in lowercase, removing stop words, and trying to keep to about six words in total after the slash. That maybe increases your chance by another couple of percent. Maybe you need to be thinking about generating your tier one GenAI media list, or maybe that increases your chances of another few percent. Maybe you need to have content cards and always turning out blogs on a weekly basis, another percent. So, stop being overwhelmed. Just do one thing because in this incredible place where nobody is leading, we’ve got this incredible opportunity where we can just do a few things and make an incredible impact of where we are.

 

DOUG: Great. Well, you’ve made an incredible impact for our viewers and listeners. Always great to speak with you and fantastic discussion. I should add that the team you were talking about was a cycling team. So, that’s where the heating pads on the thighs would make a big difference in case people thought you might have been talking about a football club or something in else the background. Jonny, so great to talk to you.

 

JONNY: Thanks so much for having me on your podcast. Thanks, Doug.